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Conference on the Free Market Mindset

From the Harvard Law School Website (published yesterday and written by Christine Perkins), here is an a nice summary of the Project on Law and Mind Science’s Third Annual Conference.

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On Saturday, March 7, Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Mind Sciences held its third annual conference, “The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology and Consequences.”

Close to 200 people attended the day-long event at HLS, bringing together leading scholars in law, economics, social psychology, and social cognition to discuss their research on the historical origins, psychological antecedents, and policy consequences of the free market mindset.

According to HLS Professor Jon Hanson, Director of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at HLS, the conference’s topic was originally intended to be moral psychology, but after the market collapse in October, conference organizers decided that the free market mindset was too important a topic to ignore.

“We did not anticipate the extent to which this topic would be as salient today as it is,” said Hanson.

Hanson said he hoped the conference would be an opportunity to examine the free market mindset in light of where we are, to explore why free markets have been so alluring to economists, scholars, and policy-makers even amidst the current financial turmoil.

The conference opened with discussions on the history of the free market idea. HLS Professor Christine Desan, a specialist in legal history, civil procedure, and legal and political thought, spoke about “Legal Categories of Thought,” how the law categorizes different kinds of liquidity — including dollars, bonds and securities. She reviewed some of the ways that legal doctrine has disciplined our thought, including assumptions about money, and about free choice in the marketplace.

In another session, Harvard University Economics professor Stephen Marglin, presented a talk on the free market and economics titled “How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community,” based on his 2008 book “The Dismal Science.” He described some of the foundational assumptions of economics have promoted social isolation over deep social bonds.

In later sessions on psychology, Sheena Iyengar, a professor in the management division of the Columbia Business School, discussed her research on “The Multiple Choice Problem,” looking at how the exercise of choosing and the availability of numerous options affect decision quality and happiness with decision outcomes.

In “Choice, Social Class, and Agency,” Nicole Stephens, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at Stanford University, presented her research and a series of lab and field studies questioning the assumption that choice is a fundamental or “basic” unit of human behavior, and that behavior is a product of individual choice.

Jaime Napier, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at New York University working with NYU Professors of Psychology Tom Tyler and John Jost, presented their research on “The Palliative Function of Ideology,” drawing on “system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals.”

In the final discussion of the day, Douglas Kysar ’98, professor of law at Yale Law School, and Hanson tackled the topics of law and policy. Kysar focused on environmental policy and argued against the use of strict cost-benefit analysis when creating environmental laws. Environmental law requires a more “humanistic approach,” he argued.

In his own talk, entitled “Regulation Reactance,” Hanson [photo right] tested his theory that there are certain policy stereotypes ingrained in American culture. Through the use of advertising clips and snips of political speeches, he showed that Americans tend to try to establish a freedom to choose when they perceive that their liberty has been inhibited. In politics, this tends to mean that people think markets lead to freedom, and government regulation is coercive. Hanson and his collaborators (including 3L student Mark Yeboah) are currently studying these implicit policy associations, and how they might affect policy recommendations.

Within the next several months, edited versions of videos from the conference will be made available on The Project on Law and Mind Sciences website (where you can already find videos of presentations from the previous two conferences). In addition, Hanson is working with a group of 3L students on a book, “Ideology, Psychology, and Law,” which will include chapters discussing some of the themes from this year’s conference.

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[…] Conference on the Free Market Mindset ? The Situationist By The Situationist Staff On Saturday, March 7, Harvard Law School?s Program on Law and Mind Sciences held its third annual conference, ?The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology and Consequences.? Close to 200 people attended the day-long event at HLS, … The Situationist – https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/ […]